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Friday, February 13, 2009

Just watch the video, it's worth it if you're at all concerned about how your website ranks in the SERPs.

She makes a very good point that if your strategy is to bookmark across hundreds of sites you're going to be in trouble. What she doesn't talk about is the quality of links from those sites. The problem with bookmarking using an autobot to get hundreds of links is that you don't get any internal support from the site -- it's just a submission with a single vote. From what everyone is hearing, Google is slapping those types of links hard.

The good news is that if you concentrate on a few high authority social media sites and get a strong number of internal links to your post (votes), you'll be that much ahead of the people that are relying upon numbers of links rather than quality.

Social media will still be important, but you need to build a strong profile with lots of incoming links (friends) to your profile and lots of incoming links (votes) to your submissions. A Digg story with 1 vote will be pretty much useless. A Digg story with 50 votes that sits in upcoming for a few days will be very powerful.

Also, don't discount the power of social media to bring traffic and other links. While you get no SEO value from a storm of StumbleUpon hits, you're likely to pick up some links as other webmasters are exposed to your content. And the evidence is building that Google is looking at its toolbar data to determine rankings. Sites that get more traffic tend to perform better in the rankings. So don't throw away traffic from sites that don't necessarily convert well because in the end that traffic helps your rankings in many indirect ways.